'When it comes to distaff dirtiness, mainstream males such as
Dickens and Dekker make easy pickings, but Green finds the greatest
treasures when he mudlarks on the margins. In Sounds & Furies,
he has dredged up some gems.' Emma Byrne, Spectator 'From fishwives
to flappers and from music hall performers to Mumsnetters, women
have indeed made contributions to the slang vocabulary of English;
by bringing together so much fascinating material about their words
and their worlds, this book makes its own contribution to the
history of both women and language.' Professor Deborah Cameron,
Professor of Language and Communication, Worcester College,
University of Oxford 'Green comprehensively disproves that slang is
inherently masculine. Mumsnetters and bulldaggers, flappers and
slappers, shicksters and hash-slingers all put in their claims as
slang-users in their own right in this entertaining and
thought-provoking book. Any writer venturing into the contentious
area of women as users, creators or objects of slang from now on
will look to Green for guidance or for arguments.' Julie Coleman,
author of The Life of Slang Slang. The ultimate in man-made
languages. The male gaze made verbal. A world where words for
intercourse mean 'man hits woman', the penis is a gun, a knife or
club and the vagina a terrifying tunnel. Possibly with teeth. Two
thousand words for woman and every one a put-down. Even 'mother' is
simply short for the grossest of obscenities. Thus the story, now
and for several hundred years. But stories are just that and
perhaps there's an alternative. In this book Jonathon Green, the
leading collector of English-language slang and drawing on forty
years of research in the field, asks whether women have another
role to play. As slang's active, positive, rebellious subject,
rather than its endlessly derided, submissive object. Sounds &
Furies represents a quest to overturn a long-established, but far
from invulnerable belief system. To show that throughout a recorded
history that starts with Chaucer's bawdy, mouthy and magnificently
self-willed Wife of Bath and carries on through a cast of working
girls and villainesses, playwrights and bestselling authors,
shop-girls and fish-wives and through to the modern, on-line worlds
of Mumsnet and Tinder, women have always made slang their own. If
slang has always been the language of the margins, then women, for
all their numbers, have also been consigned to the margins. Those
days, it is ever more clear, are over. If slang has a role then it
is to represent us at our most human. That may not mean 'admirable'
but it surely means 'true'. And humanity is on offer to everyone,
whatever gender they may claim. That goes for language, whatever
its variety, too. From the foreword by sex historian Kate Lister:
'Patriarchal cultures have understood women, controlled women, and
marginalised women. But, this book also reveals that it is the
rebellious women who used slang: the fishwives, the scolds, the
whores, and the harridans. Long may they continue to do so.'
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